port came from another quarter, at first sight surprising, — from Napoleon himself. The great conqueror, planning to draw heavily upon Prussian finances, favored Stein as a man who could develop them. Thus it was that, less than ten months after his ignominious dismissal, Stein was requested by the King to resume his old place, and, in addition, to become Minister-President of the kingdom, with full charge of the civil administration, and with great powers in military and foreign affairs, thus becoming a legislator for Prussia, with the duty of meeting the terrible exigencies of the present and of promoting a better system for the future.

There were then in being two great commissions, with which he had long been in touch, one on civil, the other on military matters; his ideas had taken possession of their members, and had wrought on them to good purpose. Stein now became the great man in the first of these bodies, and in the second he had by his side another great man, his friend, General Scharnhorst.

When these men now resumed their work, the half of the Prussian kingdom which had been left by Napoleon to its former government was a wreck, — its resources mortgaged to France, its defenders under the command of the conqueror, its people impoverished and benumbed. The spirit of Stein during this period is best described in his own reminiscences:

“We started," he says, 'from the fundamental idea of rousing a moral, religious, patriotic spirit in the nation; of inspiring it anew with courage, self-confidence, readiness for every sacrifice in the cause of independence and national honor; and of seizing the first favorable opportunity to begin the bloody and hazardous struggle for both."

His greatness in character, in thought, and in work, was recognized by his friends from the beginning. But as his task grew upon him and his plans unfolded more and more, his brain was recognized

throughout Prussia- nay, throughout Europe - as the real centre of German activity against the Napoleonic tyranny. Towering thus above all contemporary growths of Prussian statesmanship, he did not seek to overshadow or wither them. There have been great statesmen dissatisfied until they have received all royal and popular favor; unhappy until all their colleagues have drooped beneath their shadow. Stein was not of these: determined as he always was, and irritable as he frequently was, his activity called into being other activities, and these he favored and fostered; under his influence other strong and independent men grew and strengthened; and of them were such men as Hardenberg, Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Schön.

While taking care of the complicated and vexatious affairs pressing upon him from all sides, Stein and his compeers promoted a twofold revolution. The first was peaceable, favoring the creation of new institutions from which might grow a better spirit in the German people; the second was warlike, and, for a considerable time, secret and insurrectionary, a revolution against the Napoleonic tyranny, and as truly an effort for rational liberty as had been the American, and, at its beginning, the French Revolution.

The peaceful revolution naturally comes first in our thoughts, for it was the necessary preliminary of the second. Faithfully Stein and the great men who stood by him thought and wrought; not spasmodically, not by orations to applauding galleries, but quietly and steadily, in the council chamber; and on the 9th of October, 1807, appeared the first of the great edicts of emancipation. These had three main purposes: first, to abolish the serf system; secondly, to sweep away restrictions in buying and selling land; thirdly, to prevent the great. proprietors from using their position and capital to buy up small farms, after the English fashion, and thus rooting out the yeomanry. Underlying, overarching, and permeating all these objects was one

great thought and purpose, to create a new people.

the intent

First, as to the serf system. It was essentially the same mass of evil which had done so much to bring on the revolution in France. De Tocqueville has shown how the wrongs which grew out of outworn feudalism had separated the French nation into distinct peoples, hating each other more and more, and at last ready to spring at each other's throats. This process had not gone so far in Germany as in France. The French mind, with its clearness and its proneness to carry ideas to their logical results, had moved faster and farther than had the thoughts of the lower classes in Germany; but the German peasantry, and, indeed, the whole German people beneath the nobility, had become more and more indifferent to the ties which guaranteed national unity. When we read Arthur Young's indignant accounts of the French peasantry as he saw them just on the eve of the Revolution, we naturally think that France, as regarded her rural population, had reached a lower point than had any of her sister nations; but there is ample evidence that rural Germany was at that time certainly as wretched as rural France, and possibly more so. Goethe, who went over the French frontier with the German army in 1792, tells us that he found in the cabins of the French peasantry white bread and wine, whereas in those of the German peasantry he had found only black bread and no wine. As to galling oppression, had Arthur Young gone into the Prussian dominions, he would doubtless have given us pictures quite as harrowing as those he brought from France. Take a few of the leading Prussian regions. In Brandenburg, largely an agricultural region, out of ninety thousand inhabitants, there were hardly three hundred and fifty who owned land; these held sway in courts, churches, schools, enjoyed police and hunting privileges, and down to 1799 were mainly exempt from tolls, taxes, and service as soldiers. About one-sixth of the Branden

burg peasantry had, under feudal tenure, the use of a little land, but the great body of peasants were virtually day-laborers. In Silesia the peasant was, as a rule, held under strict serfdom: compelled to remain on the land; could only marry by consent of his lord; and his children were obliged to remain on the soil as farm laborers unless graciously permitted by the lord of the land to take up some other occupation. In the principality of Minden, at the death of every peasant onehalf of his little movable property went to his lord. In Polish Prussia, the serf, as a rule, could own absolutely nothing. He and all that was his belonged to his lord; the land owners had managed to evade even the simplest feudal obligation, and could throw out their tenants as they

chose.

Various Prussian rulers had striven to diminish the pressure of all this wrong. Frederick the Great, cynical as he appeared, sought to mitigate the brutalizing influences of this debased feudalism, and Frederick William III had shown a wish to make some beginning of better things; but the adverse influences were too strong. Nobles and clergy were then in Protestant Prussia what they had been in the days of Turgot in Catholic France, and their orators struck their keynote in declaring this existing order of things “a system ordained by God;" that thereby alone virtue, honor, and property could be secured; that to change it was to give up their beautiful, patriarchal heritage. Hearing this utterance, one would suppose that under this system the rule was kind treatment from the upper, and love from the lower classes; but the fact was that while the feudal lord's idea of his right had become grossly magnified his idea of his duty had mainly disappeared; the system had become fearfully oppressive and was enveloped in a cloud of distrust, faultfinding, and hate.1

1 For a very clear detailed statement regarding the condition of the Prussian and German peasantry generally, see Häusser: Deutsche Geschichte, vol. iii, pp. 123 and following.

And not only were the people who cultivated the land thus bound, but the very soil itself was in fetters tied up by feudal restrictions as to sale and cultivation which had become absurd. Under the old system, the three castes — the nobility, the burghers, the peasants had been carefully kept each to itself. The rule, resulting from the theory underlying the whole, was that the nobility must not engage in the occupations of the burgher class; that burghers must be kept well separated from the peasant class; and that to this end, all three classes should be hampered by a network of restrictions upon their power to hold land. Barriers of every sort had been built between these three classes. Broad tracts of land were lying waste because their noble proprietors had not the capital with which to till them, and yet were forbidden to sell them; great amounts of capital were lying idle because burghers who had accumulated it were by the laws and customs hindered in various ways from applying it to land owned by nobles; trade was stagnant and multitudes of young nobles idle because they must not engage in trade. All this, with many kindred masses of evil which had been developed in the same spirit, were now largely swept away, yet not without opposition; political philosophers and declaimers filled the air with arguments to prove these reforms wicked and perilous; nobles of the court, high officers of the army, and landed proprietors, in great numbers, caballed against the reformer; General Yorck, one of the best and strongest men of the time, declared the new measures monstrous; but Stein persevered and forced through the edict which, three years later, on St. Martin's Day, 1810, struck feudal fetters from two-thirds of the Prussian people, and extinguished serfdom under Prussian rule forever.1

It is only just to say that for this great edict of 1807 and for the later legislation 1 See Treitschke: Deutsche Geschichte, vol. i, p. 281.

which supplemented it, transforming serfs into freemen throughout Prussia, various colleagues and assistants of Stein, and especially Hardenberg, Altenstein, and Schön, deserve also to be forever held in remembrance. They too had given long and trying labor to it all; they had taken the better thought of their time and brought it into effective form; but the credit of giving life to what they thus produced, and of forcing their main ideas upon the conservatism of the nation, nation, beginning with the King himself, belongs, first of all, to Stein. Others saw, as he did, the causes of the Prussian downfall; others contributed precious thought in devising this great restoration; but his was the eye which saw most clearly the goal which must be reached; his the courage which withstood all threats and broke through all obstacles; his the mental strength which, out of vague beliefs and aspirations, developed fundamental, constitutional laws; his the moral strength which, more than that of any other German statesman, uplifted three-fourths of the whole population, gave them a new interest in the kingdom, and a feeling for its welfare such as had never before been known in Prussia, and thus did most to create that national spirit which was destined to sweep everything before it in the Freedom War of 1813, in the War for German Unity in 1866, and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

It may be objected to these claims for Stein that the fundamental thought in his reforms was derived from Adam Smith. That statement is true. It cannot be denied that Adam Smith,2 penetrating thinker that he was, set in motion the trains of thought which largely resulted in Prussian emancipation; yet

2 For a very full discussion of Adam Smith's influence, see Roscher in the Berichte der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 1867; and for a careful statement as to the influence of Smith on Stein, see pp. 5, 6. Roscher's concession is all the more convincing since he is clearly inclined to minimize Smith's influence on German thought in general.

this detracts not at all from the glory of Stein and the statesmen who wrought with him. All the more glory to them for recognizing, developing, and, finally, for enforcing the great Englishman's thought, in a way which has proved a blessing, not merely to Germany, but to humanity.

Another great work now begun by Stein was the reform of the city governments. The enfranchisement of the serfs had been due, largely, to the spirit of reform aroused in general thought by Voltaire, Rousseau, and their compeers, and in economic science by Adam Smith; but this city reform was peculiarly his own; the need of it had doubtless been felt by many; good methods of promoting it had been seen by few; the practical measure for carrying it into effect was the work of Stein alone.

This system, which has been fruitful in blessings ever since his time, though in principle somewhat like that of England, differed from it widely. It was the very opposite of the system fastened upon France by the French Revolution and by Napoleon. As Seeley very justly says, "The French Revolution began at the top, creating a central national legislature and giving all the power to that, leaving town and local organizations generally deprived of all life, making the prefects of departments and the mayors of communities mere functionaries appointed from the central government at Paris and representing the ideas of the capital." The reform of Stein began at the base, giving selfgovernment to the towns, schooling them in managing their own affairs, in checking their own functionaries, in taking their own responsibilities. While keeping the central monarchy strong, his great exertion was to restore fitness for public life in the country at large: by his first reform he had converted the rural serfs into beings who could feel that they had an interest in the country; by this new reform he sought to exercise the city populations in public affairs.

The old city system of Europe had, many centuries before, been a main agency in developing civilization: Guizot declares it the main legacy from Rome to the Middle Ages; Maurer asserts that it saved the Reformation. The Roman Empire was made up of cities. When all else save the Church was swept away and the country districts desolated, these cities remained, and in them was a continuity of much that was best in the old civilization, and a potency of vast good in the new. During the Middle Ages their vigor increased. The cities wrested from the feudal lords right after right; the city magnates leagued with the distant emperor or king against the petty feudal oppressors immediately above them; when the feudal lords wanted money to join the Crusades the cities brought it, and bought with it rights and immunities. The commerce of the Middle Ages developed many of these towns nobly, especially throughout Italy and Germany; but Vasco da Gama's passage around the Cape of Good Hope having largely withdrawn trade with the East Indies from the Mediterranean, the commercial cities, not only in Italy, but even in Germany, lost for a time a very large share of their prosperity.

During the Reformation period, many of the German cities having recovered strength and shown hospitality to the new thought, various leading reformers in Northern and Middle Germany took refuge in them, and there found protection against Pope and Emperor. In the League of Schmalkald, sturdily defying all efforts to crush out civil and religious liberty, we find territorial princes associated in a widespread confederation with warlike cities; but in the seventeenth century the Thirty Years' War ruined many of these city centres, and diminished the power of them all; so that after the Treaty of Westphalia the sway of the princes was greatly extended, and only a few of the greater cities could withstand them.

Especially did political liberty, that is, the right of citizens to take part in public affairs, die out in Prussia. The strong race of the Hohenzollerns might at times make use of a local self-government, but as a rule they overrode it, and everything tended more and more to centralization; until finally the genius and absolute power of Frederick the Great seemed to remove from men's minds the last remaining ideas essential to city independence. The individual citizen was comparatively of no account; he became essentially a parasite, living upon a state whose real life was centred in the brain of the monarch. As a result of all this, whatever authorities there were in the German towns wrought at cross purposes: there was a medley of various sorts of municipalities, and in them, royal tax administrators, municipal figureheads, guilds, privileges, customs, usages, exemptions, ceremonies, benumbing the whole organization, save when some genius like the Great Elector or Frederick the Great broke through them. The mass of dwellers in cities came more and more to consider public affairs as no concern of theirs.1

So far had this obliteration of city activities gone in Prussian towns that although various guilds, corporations, and privileged persons were the nominal authorities, the paid offices were filled largely with old invalids of the army. And what, in a general national emergency, was to be expected from a nation made up of a city class like this, and of a rural class like the serfs in the fields ? No wonder that Prussians seemed to look on the downfall of Prussia and Germany with stupid indifference, and applauded Napoleon at the Brandenburg Gate.

On this mass of unreason in the city organizations Stein had thought for years. Other patriotic public servants

1 For a lucid account of the action of the Great Elector and Frederick the Great in at times breaking through these city privileges, or, as they were called. "rights," see Tuttle: History of Prussia.

had also thought upon it, and at last, at Königsberg, afar off in the northeast corner of the Prussian state, in this its time of dire trouble, some of them prepared a tentative plan of self-government for their own city. This plan, largely under the influence of Stein, now grew into a provisional system covering sundry neighboring towns, and this, under quiet suggestions from him, was finally sent to the King. His Majesty naturally referred the whole matter back to his great minister, who now began work upon it directly and energetically, and developed out of it a system applicable not only to the cities which had asked for it, but to all the towns in the Prussian kingdom. Thus, mainly under Stein's hands, came into being the great statutes for municipal reform.

By these statutes the municipal medley of Prussia was swept away, and the cities were divided into three classes: "great towns," with ten thousand residents and upward; 66 middle towns,"

with thirty-five hundred residents and upward; "small towns," all the others. Every town now took part in the election of its own authorities, and in all towns of above eight hundred inhabitants there was a division into wards, each with its own local powers.

As a rule, all were recognized as burghers who owned real estate or other property which insured a direct, tangible interest in the city; but soldiers, Jews, Mennonites, and criminals were excluded. Magistrates and town representatives were, as a rule, selected by the assembly of citizens, the number of councilors varying from twenty-four in the smaller to a hundred in the larger towns. Every elector must appear at the polls and vote, under penalty of losing his citizenship by continued neglect of this duty. Two-thirds of the town councilors must be resident householders; they received no pay, and, as to the theory of their relations with their constituents, it is well worth noting that each represented, not his guild, not his